How close are we to understanding the point where it all began? The Big Bang, first article in a new series by Amnon Jacont about the new discoveries in astrophysics
Amnon Jaconte
This is how it began: time is 15 billion years before the present day. A single nucleus drifts in an infinity whose nature is unknown. From the outside, the nucleus looks tiny and resembles other particles that float around it, but inside, material is compressed with a density that is difficult to describe. Suddenly, for a reason that no one can explain, the inner material bursts the nuclear shell with a huge bang. All the building blocks of the world are thrown out at once in a trillion degree centigrade riot. The universe was born. Time is ticking.
The universe is already one second old, and the new matter particles are moving away from the center quickly. The temperature drops and the flying particles cool down a little and start to coalesce. After a few hours, the combustion of all the chemical elements that make up the universe is complete, and a million-year era opens in which it only expands and cools, like an expanding puddle. In some areas, huge lumps of molten material form, which the falling temperature turns into a solid. Other blocks still store active gases within them and become huge reactors that emit radiation of light and heat. One of these objects, which will later be called "Sun", provides energy to a series of bodies around it: the planets, and the Earth among them. A stray celestial body splashes part of the Earth back into space. The tez settles not far away and reflects the sunlight at night. Millions of years later, when man appears, he will call him "Moon".
The country is still not a pleasant place to live. The temperature in it is very high and the air layer that surrounds it has not yet formed. The heat decomposes the ancient rocks into gases, the most prominent of which is hydrogen sulfide, the same gas that gives rotten eggs their characteristic smell. The planet we live in now resembles a scorched egg moving in circles around the solar furnace. But in the oceans, primary molecules are already coalescing and devouring the sulphide hydrogen with lust. In return, they return to the environment an element that slowly changes the composition of the air surrounding the earth: oxygen.
The molecules multiply and die en masse in the primordial soup of hot water and abundant chemicals. The percentage of oxygen in the air increases. More complex forms of life develop: fish, followed by reptiles, among which one family thrives in particular - the dinosaurs. But never resilience. Another celestial body collides with the earth and this time raises a cloud of dust that wipes out the vegetation and subsequently the animals as well. The dinosaurs are dying en masse and the competition for first place is reopening.
This time, nature learns lessons and instead of developing the reptiles to huge dimensions, turns the way to another type of animals - the mammals. Some of them stay in the water, others go up on land, run on four limbs, rise on two to reach the fruits of the trees and develop skills in their two front limbs that allow them to turn items around them into primitive work tools: sticks for killing worms from gnawing in trees or stones for cracking nuts and eggs. One of the mammal families goes through a long series of incarnations until it becomes a new essence, similar to its walking ancestors and at the same time different from them: man.
The changing universe
Age chases age and man loses significant parts of his physical abilities in favor of the development of one crucial organ: the brain. At first he uses it for self-defense and finding food, then he turns to domesticating plants and animals, and at some point he starts asking questions about the origins of life and the world. Religion, to one degree or another of creativity, explains creation in a series of stories. Science tries to provide more accurate answers: Aristotle, for example, assumed that the earth is the center of the universe and was therefore created first. 700 years after him, Ptolemy of Alexandria offers a similar model, but leaves enough room for the next world and hell, something that later made him a favorite of the Christian church.
The first scientific breakthrough occurs in the 16th century when a Polish priest, Nicolaus Copernicus, assumes that the sun stands motionless in the center, and the earth, together with all the planets, move around it in circular tracks. About a hundred years later, an Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei, takes a look at a modern device - the telescope - and discovers that several moons-satellites revolve around the planet Jupiter. This implies that not every heavenly body must directly surround the earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy thought, and Copernicus's theory is for the first time confirmed by the observation of J. A few more decades pass and another scientist, Isaac Newton, discovers the reason for the movements of the stars: the gravitational force (attraction) of each star acts on the stars close to it and "dances" them.
Still the dominant assumption is that the cosmic system is stable. Each star is in its place, and the mutual gravitation forces ensure that it does not drift away. At the beginning of the 20th century, Albert Einstein broke into the world's consciousness with a new theory - the theory of relativity, which apparently corrects Newton's laws. Among other things, it explains for the first time how energy turns into matter and matter turns into energy. The creation process, in which enormous amounts of energy were transformed into matter and vice versa, is an expected, even requested, goal for the application of the theory of relativity. However, when Einstein and his students were developed in applying the theory to the universe, an amazing conclusion was revealed to them: the universe is not stable as everyone believed, led by Newton, but rather dynamic and continues to expand continuously and who knows, maybe even shrink.
Einstein is not a bold person by nature, and between the two options - recognizing the instability of the universe or deciding that his theory has made an error - he chooses the second. In order to adjust his theory to what he perceives as reality, he adds an artificial mathematical element to his equation and receives a revised theory of relativity that allows for the existence of a completely stable universe. However, a few years later, in 1929, an unknown scientist, Edwin Hubble, came out with a sensational announcement: the universe is indeed unstable and does not stand still. Basically, nothing has changed since the big bang either. The universe continues to expand.
The astronomers grind their teeth. Only a few years earlier they had to swallow Einstein's sensational corrections, and now a native of a small town in Montana, who had already been a boxer, weightlifter and lawyer in his life, is proposing to them to declare the universe as an ever-changing entity. They check his observations, go over the calculations he made and read the conclusions in detail. Finally they are forced to admit: the universe does continue to expand.
Einstein, in fairness, realizes that he was wrong when he tried to impose prejudices on the theory he came up with. He publicly regrets that he lost the opportunity to announce the expansion of the universe and calls the artificial element he introduced in his equation: "My biggest blunder". When the artificial element is removed from the equation, and the physical and mathematical debates are settled, the scientists focus on another question: what will happen when the expansion of the universe stops? What will happen if you don't stop? Of the two options, this one was more explained based on the experience gained over thousands of years of human observation of nature: just as a stone thrown into the air stops from accelerating and then falls back to earth, so the universe will stop at a certain moment in its expansion and then its parts will return to approach each other, driven by their gravity, until they shrink again to their initial dimensions.
the dark matter
But in the early days of the 21st century, something fell through. Measurements have proven that the universe is not only not slowing down its expansion, but even accelerating it, and there are many chances that in the end, in millions of years, it will spread everywhere. Now the scientists were at a loss: if the slowing of the expansion could be explained by the action of gravity, then the acceleration is a seemingly unsolvable mystery. In order to accelerate, bodies need additional energy, like pressing the gas pedal in a car, and in the case of the universe - additional energy on top of the one that repelled the particles in the big bang. What is this energy that causes the universe to accelerate its expansion? Where does it come from and where is it accumulated?
No one has found a real answer, and all that can be assumed is that the energy does not arise from some central core, but is everywhere, carried within every particle. We have already found someone who called this hidden energy "dark energy", and in order to represent it in the theory of relativity, an artificial mathematical element was once again introduced into the Einsteinian equation, about eighty years after Einstein himself omitted it.
But the mathematical trick did not solve the physical question, which is still pending: what is the essence of dark energy? One of the answers to this is located ten minutes' walk from the Rehovot train station, in the physics building of the Weizmann Institute. Prof. Moti Milgrom, a theoretical astrophysicist, feeds on the observations of astronomers and bases his conclusions on them. "According to the popular opinion", he explains, "the universe contains three types of matter:
ordinary matter, which contributes only about three or four percent of the density of the universe; 'dark energy', the nature of which is unknown and makes up about 70 percent of the universe, and 'dark matter' DARK Matter), the essence of which is unclear, but the accepted hypothesis holds that it is made of a type of particle that emits radiation to such a tiny degree that the instruments we have today are unable to absorb ".
In an article he published in "Scientific American," Milgrom compares the influence of dark matter on the universe to the actions of a puppet theater operator. The visible stuff is the puppets on the stage, but the ones pulling the strings are dark energy and dark matter.
Milgrom attacks the problem from a new direction: the galaxies, those cosmic systems that are similar to the system we are in - the Milky Way - and lie outside of it, sometimes at a great distance. "In the early XNUMXs, I began to wonder why galaxies actually look as if they contain less matter than their structure requires. Observing the universe also raises the same question: assuming that matter and energy are one and the same, the amount of matter that we see directly in the universe falls far short of the amount that theoretically should be in it. We explain this through the apparent existence of 'dark matter', which we are unable to locate, but isn't another answer possible?"
The 'other answer', according to Milgrom, is that Newton's laws do not necessarily correspond to the conditions prevailing in the universe, outside the Earth. If we return to the example of a stone thrown in the air, it is clear that the stone obeys two of Newton's laws: the law that defines the force of gravity and the law that states that additional energy must be mobilized to create acceleration. "These laws explain with great precision the flight of a ballistic missile and the movement of stars in our galaxy, but they have never been tested under the conditions of other galaxies and in distant regions of the universe," explains Milgrom. "If it turns out that they are not valid there, the assumption that galaxies contain dark matter will also become redundant. Since astronomical observations confirm that the universe is homogeneous, that is, it contains the same substances and the same properties wherever we look, it follows that we can conclude that even in our galaxy and in the parts of the universe known to us there is no dark matter."
the missing ingredient
If there is no dark matter in the galaxies as well as in the universe, how can the acceleration of the expansion of the universe be explained in opposition to the forces of gravity? "It is possible that the laws of Newtonian mechanics that we know and that work well in the solar system or in the laboratory simply do not apply in galaxies nor in the universe," suggests Milgrom. The obvious result is that when it comes to the universe, we must re-examine our concepts regarding gravity and acceleration, and if on the surface of the earth and its surroundings it is necessary to "press the gas pedal" to allow the particles to accelerate and overcome the force of gravity, then in other galaxies, where completely different laws of gravity and acceleration operate, an additional Such an energy is not necessary at all, and therefore there is no need to explain the absence of any dark energy or dark matter.
And Newton? Milgrom is unfazed by the fact that he challenges the rules that every high school student memorizes as the Sinaitic Torah. "There were at least two previous cases in which it became necessary to introduce radical changes in Newton's theory", he mentions. "The first change upgraded the Newtonian theory by adding the theory of relativity to it. The second change led to the quantum theory". In his opinion, the missing element in his theory is something else: "a generalization within an umbrella theory that would be compatible with other theories, such as the theory of relativity".
In this spirit, the theory formulated by Milgrom is known as MOND, the acronym for "Modified Newtonian Dynamics". It still remains to be ascertained what it can contribute to the understanding of the creation process. The practical conclusion, as mentioned, is that the same primary force that caused the Big Bang acts on the universe even today, and our assumption that there are other, mysterious forces and substances, stems only from short-sightedness.
A more philosophical conclusion is related to the status of science today. "Until about a hundred years ago, people were looking for absolute truth. The rapid exchange of theories that occurred in the 20th century. The theory of special relativity, the theory of general relativity, the theory of quantum, the theory of fields - has resulted in the fact that every serious scientist will agree today that there is no absolute theory and there is no theory that claims to reach the truth. It is enough for teachings that they approach it."
Is there anything in changing the attitude towards scientific truth to cause an opening in man's relationship to science in general? Milgrom flatly denies this. "The change I described does not refer to the value of science as a guide to understanding life, like religion or logic, and does not undermine its status as a pillar on which man builds his system of considerations. Sometimes, in the debate between religion and science, the argument is heard that science should not be believed, because it does not know everything. This is a demagogic argument. Science does not know everything, but it knows a lot and tries to know more."
where is god
However, paradoxically, it is precisely the short-sightedness of science and its distance from the traditional position of all-knowing, that brings some of the clergy closer to it. On the contact page for the students of the Mount Etzion yeshiva in the Alon-Shabbat of the IDF (www.vbm-torah.org), Rabbi Yoel Ben-Non preaches for the objective use of the human mind even by people of faith: "The human mind was created by the Creator, blessed be His name - Together with all the ramah of the limbs and the shasha of the tendons - and we have no other way but to use our intellect, to use the knowledge we have acquired with its help and to integrate it during the study of the Torah. If we do not do so, we will not be able to fulfill the mitzvot of Talmud Torah according to the way of the Sages. One can admire the Torah, love it, be afraid of it, stand still in front of it, dance with it - even without thinking, and even without opening it. But in order to 'learn and teach, keep, do and sustain', you have to use the intelligence that God gave us."
The illustration that Rabbi Ben-Nun chose for the use that must be made of the intellect is remarkably close to the subject of Milgrom's research: "With modern telescopes, one can see with the eye nebulae (galaxies) of stars, located at vast distances, and one can also calculate the distance between us and them. On top of that, one can also calculate the enormous speed at which each Starfish Nebula is moving away from our own. These are facts that can be seen, checked and calculated. The current scientific interpretation of these facts is that our entire universe was born in a primordial light burst.
For the first time in history, an amazing match was made between the modern scientific interpretation and chapter XNUMX of the book of Genesis.
"Alia and a thorn in her. The scientists prove in their calculations that the big bang happened about 15 billion years ago, and thus the wondering believer is left with only one option: to interpret the verses written in the Torah that God gave so that they fit the facts emerging from the world that God created! The true believer cannot disbelieve in the facts, because in this he disbelieves God forbid that God created this world that we discover and see. At the same time, the true believer also cannot disapprove of the Torah that God gave us, nor the fact that God alone created the world, gave the Torah, and planted our intellect in us."
In order to reconcile the gaps between the Big Bang theory and the biblical story of creation, Rabbi Ben-Nun suggests understanding "that 'six days' are not 24-hour 'days', but a code in which the Creator of the world and the giver of the Torah calls vast and unfathomable ages", or accept That "the Torah did not come to explain processes and phenomena in the nature of creation, but to teach us the mitzvot of Shabbat only.
Therefore, there is no doubt that science today speaks of a primordial burst of light, in such a way that fits the language of the Torah, and even if science had described a completely different nature, nothing would have been removed from the Torah. According to this method, there is no real meaning to counting the years according to the Torah, and the descriptions of creation are only images (metaphors), which came to root the idea of the Sabbath and its mitzvot.
New thinking is needed
It seems that the compatibility between science and religion, which Rabbi Ben-Nun praises, is only partial and far from consoling. There is still a great gap in perception between the two, thanks to which religion allows itself to explain the moment of creation itself, while science is only able to deal with the seconds, hours and years that followed. When will it be possible to scientifically explain the way the big bang was formed and even more, to answer the question of the questions: who or what caused it?
It seems that to answer this a new, different way of thinking is needed, like the one that Leonardo da Vinci lacked when he insisted on building a flying machine that imitated the flapping of the wings of birds, and like the one in which the Wright brothers generously endowed two bicycle facilities from a town in Ohio, when they realized that in this case there was no point in imitating nature and as far as human aviation is concerned - the future lies in the propeller.
It is also possible that the new thinking necessary to understand the essence of the Big Bang is not only physical or mathematical. It may take place in a seemingly remote area and affect the exploration of the universe indirectly, such as the political and social thinking that enabled the scientific revolution in the 17th century, the accelerated industrialization of parts of Europe in the 19th century, or the space race in the 20th century. XNUMX
To the same extent, it may also be expressed in the more intimate area of a person's understanding of his body, and especially the perfection of orientation in the intricacies of the brain and the operation of the senses activated by him. And perhaps this is what Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Nobel laureate for the discovery of the neurons in the brain, was referring to when he declared: "As long as the brain is a mystery, the universe will also be a mystery."
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